Ransom
By David Malouf
Chatto & Windus £14, 240 pages
FT Bookshop price: £11.19

David Malouf discovered Homer’s Iliad as a child in Australia in the second world war. Similarly suspended amid a conflict whose outcome he could not know, the story moved him. Homer’s account of the Trojan war weighed on Malouf’s mind for more than 60 years before he produced Ransom, a work of immediacy, humanity and tenderness.

The author’s 1999 Untold Tales examined the unrevealed background behind familiar stories, enlarging on the role of Greek hero Ulysses in shaking Achilles out of the sulk that left the Greeks exposed to their Trojan enemies. In Ransom, Malouf’s first novel for more than a decade, this theme is more explicit. The book, his seventh novel, retells the Iliad, particularly its final book in which Priam, the Trojan king, travels to the enemy camp to ransom the body of his son Hector, slain by Achilles in revenge for his own killing of the Greek’s lifelong friend.

Classical subjects, particularly Homer, still fascinate contemporary writers: notable examples include Christopher Logue’s modernist poetic take on the Iliad in War Music (2001) and Margaret Atwood’s account of the Odyssey in her Penelopiad (2005). Indeed, Malouf’s own An Imaginary Life (1999) was a lyrical recreation of the Roman poet’s exile to the cultural purgatory of the Black Sea, punished for a literary slight to the Emperor Augustus.

The grand themes of the war’s background are sketched out with the vividness and colour of the original, as befits a reshaping of the Greek epic. Malouf recreates a world in which the mores of Bronze Age warriors and rulers seem natural and obvious, suspending with a lightness of touch the weight of the intervening millennia. Yet his master-stroke is to add an “untold” element: a character called Somax, a humble muleteer hired to transport Priam and the gold ransom with which the Trojan king hopes to induce Achilles to hand over Hector’s corpse.

Priam’s world has been one of gravitas, of ceremony, of duty. Progressing to the Greek camp, he is brought gently into contact with the real world: the tiny fish that nibble at the king’s feet as he cools his toes in the river; or Somax’s delicious homespun cooking. Somax, too, has lost sons – to more mundane causes than the battles that carried off Priam’s children – and this shared grief and the sense of love of fathers for their sons bring lord and commoner together.

The overturning of established practice, the thinking of what had hitherto been unthinkable, is another of Malouf’s principal themes. Achilles brutally drags the corpse of Hector by chariot around the walls of Troy, and shockingly transgresses the warrior code. His account of Achilles’ barbarity stirs echoes of more recent examples – the 2004 mutilation of American corpses by Iraqi insurgents in Falluja, for example.

Hector’s body ransomed, Priam and Somax return to Troy and their journey unfolds in reverse; normal codes of behaviour and the brooding certainty of the war’s bloody end reassert themselves. Malouf succeeds beautifully in transporting the reader into the world and thought patterns of archaic Greece and then in part subverting them. His elegant prose is delightful, imbued with just a touch of the stylised vigour of Homer’s poem: Hector’s body raises “a dust cloud that swirls and thickens as if at that spot on the plain a storm had gathered and for long minutes raged and twisted while all around the world remained still”.

The slow, unhurried pace of Ransom may not appeal to all readers. But in bringing something radically new, yet sensitively overlaid, to an already powerful epic, Malouf proves that an “untold tale” may be every bit as rewarding as its ancient original.

Philip Parker is the author of ‘The Empire Stops Here: A Journey Along the Frontiers of the Roman World’